Scotland Yard captures suspected LulzSec spokesman

The London Metropolitan Police arrested a 19-year-old Shetland
Islands man on Wednesday who they say is "Topiary", the most
visible figure in LulzSec.

The police news release doesn't name the suspect. The bust is
the second high-profile arrest of an alleged member of the six-man
hacking gang. British police last week arrested a 16-year-old they
say is "T-Flow" -- another prominent member. In June they arrested
19-year-old Ryan Cleary of Wickford, Essex, who allegedly ran an
IRC channel used by the group.

LulzSec's leader, "Sabu," remained active on Twitter Wednesday
morning, but did not immediately acknowledge the arrest of his
purported frontman.

Topiary has served as the public face of LulzSec since
it came to prominence in May with an intrusion at the website
of PBS Newshour, where it posted
a false news story announcing that deceased rapper Tupac Shakur
had been found "alive and well" in New Zealand. By then the gang
had already hacked Sony's
Japanese website, and before that Fox.com -- where the group
stole and posted 363 employee passwords, along with the names,
phone numbers and e-mail addresses of 73,000 people who had signed
up for audition information for the Fox talent show The
X-Factor.

Subsequent hacks included the Arizona Department of Public
Safety and other Sony sites, including one where LulzSec
obtained and posted the e-mail addresses and passwords of about
50,000 consumers who'd registered for one of three Sony promotional
sweepstakes.

By late June, web vigilantes and rival hackers had exposed what
they said were the real identities of LulzSec's members, and the
gang announced on 25 June that it was disbanding. The group emerged
from its brief retirement last week to deface a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper website.

Update 1402 28/07/2011: There's rumours
swirling around that Lulzsec may have duped the police into
arresting the wrong person. Unverified chat logs suggest that the
group is taking revenge on the person arrested for claiming to be
Topiary over the past year.

Edited by Alice Vincent

Comments

Topiary was the voice of the (see youTube) Westboro hack. Surely the Brits know whether that's a Scots/Shetland accent or Swedish. But the 'Jester' is certain Topiary is a Swede. It sounds Scottish to me, but I'm no expert. Voiceprinting would establish whether the youTube Swede (speaking Swedish) and the Westboro video voice are the same (fluently bilingual) person.